Molly: I want to talk to you a little bit about evil. I often see you get asked about this notion that you can make money as a business without doing evil. And it seems possible that once you get to a certain size, you may always be evil to someone or you may have setup what? Is an impossible standard and I guess, I was just wondering if you ever wish you hadn’t put that in there?
Eric: No actually, we’re very happy about the evil or the lack of evil comments. My own view on Google and where we are now is it we are facing the kind of criticisms that you're referencing because we are a company that is a disruptor. And we are also a company of significant scale. And I think we all agree to that. And we are in the information business and people care a lot of information for many legitimate reasons. And by the way the rule is different from country to country. So we have to deal with different standards, different social standards, different cultural standards to what people want.
So from our perspective, the principle of do no evil was not a rule in the sense that there was a defining line and you may do this and you may not do that, but it was more a practice. That If something appears evil, it’s okay in our culture for an employee of any kind to say anywhere, to say I think that’s evil. And it forces the conversation. So it’s a way of our culture, if you will, correcting around, maybe we’re making a mistake or maybe we’re too aggressive here or we’ retoo greedy here or what have you. And as long as we’re focus on end user benefit, we should be just fine.
Molly: And so interesting because it feels like that’s always been your position and yet you make people kind of nervous. What do you think it is about Google at this point that makes people feel generally uneasy with? A lot of user question just saying, I'm scared. You have all of my stuff. Are you skynet? What do you think it is, is the size? Is it the information?
Eric: I think it’s a combination of size and scale, and we work hard to communicate our values a company. We also make it easier for people who are dissatisfied with Google to leave Google. We have the strangely named Did A Liberation Front Group, whose job is to get information out of Google and to our competitor’s systems. So we think that consumer is not only can trust us because of our public statements, plus if we violated them we would be sort of destroyed in the media and our brand. But also, we would do it for other reasons, good moral reasons. And finally we want to keep them as a customer. We make it easy for them to search.
Tom: I wanted to just go back to the evil notion for a second and just ask real quick. Has your cultural definition of evil change as you’ve grown from a smaller company focus almost exclusively on search to a company that is doing so many different things right now?
Eric: The significant change I think has been the globalization of the company. Because there are things which are not evil in America which are evil in other cultures.
Tom: And vice versa.
Eric: And vice versa. So there had been a number of cases, which I’d rather not go in to, where we had robust conversations, if you will. Where an employee or a group say, look this is just wrong. But it’s okay with American sensibilities, and vice versa. And we've taken the position that we are a global company, not just an American company. We have to represent and respect that. Certainly, the China decision, which is very controversial at the time, but I think ultimately the right one for us, is another example of a tortured internal discussion which ultimately came to roughly the right outcome.
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